While the breaking of Valerie Plame's cover as a NOC operative of the
CIA may be regarded as serious in and of itself, there has been some
speculation that the damage caused by the leak may extend in very specific
directions related to Plame's work with her cover company, Brewster
Jennings & Associates. While the majority of commentators felt that
her husband was the target for the smear, a body of evidence points
to another motive for the leak. The leak may have been instigated as
a move to end Plame's work spying on the Saudi royal family, and more
specifically her investigation into whether the Saudi oilfields had
passed their peak of productivity (see peak oil). In this view (found
for example in Michael Ruppert's From The Wilderness news service, [65])
the leak was an attempt to silence and/or discredit Plame's findings
on the state of the world's oil supply, thereby impairing the functioning
of the CIA's ability to inform the administration, in turn reducing
its ability to act usefully.

Not only was Plame's cover blown, so was that of her cover company,
Brewster, Jennings & Associates. With the public exposure of Plame,
intelligence agencies all over the world started searching data bases
for any references to her (TIME Magazine). Damage control was immediate,
as the CIA asserted that her mission had been connected to weapons of
mass destruction.
However, it was not long before stories from the Washington Post and
the Wall Street Journal tied Brewster, Jennings & Associates to
energy, oil and the Saudi-owned Arabian American Oil Company, or ARAMCO.
Brewster Jennings had been a founder of Mobil Oil company, one of Aramco's
principal founders.
According to additional sources interviewed by Wayne Madsen, Brewster
Jennings was, in fact, a well-established CIA proprietary company, linked
for many years to ARAMCO. The demise of Brewster Jennings was also guaranteed
the moment Plame was outed.
It takes years for Non-Official Covers or NOCs, as they are known, to
become really effective. Over time, they become gradually more trusted;
they work their way into deeper information access from more sensitive
sources. NOCs are generally regarded in the community as among the best
and most valuable of all CIA operations officers and the agency goes
to great lengths to protect them in what are frequently very risky missions.
By definition, Valerie Plame was an NOC. Yet unlike all other NOCs who
fear exposure and torture or death from hostile governments and individual
targets who have been judged threats to the United States, she got done
in by her own President, whom we also judge to be a domestic enemy of
the United States.
Moreover, as we will see below, Valerie Plame may have been one of the
most important NOCs the CIA had in the current climate. Let's look at
just how valuable she was.

ARAMCO
According to an April 29, 2002 report in Britain's Guardian, ARAMCO
constitutes 12% of the world's total oil production; a figure which
has certainly increased as other countries have progressed deeper into
irreversible decline.
ARAMCO is the largest oil group in the world, a state-owned Saudi company
in partnership with four major US oil companies. Another one of Aramco’s
partners is Chevron-Texaco which gave up one of its board members, Condoleezza
Rice, when she became the National Security Advisor to George Bush.
All of ARAMCO’s key decisions are made by the Saudi royal family
while US oil expertise, personnel and technology keeps the cash coming
in and the oil going out. ARAMCO operates, manages, and maintains virtually
all Saudi oil fields – 25% of all the oil on the planet.
It gets better.
According to a New York Times report on March 8th of this year, ARAMCO
is planning to make a 25% investment in a new and badly needed refinery
to produce gasoline. The remaining 75% ownership of the refinery will
go to the only nation that is quickly becoming America's major world
competitor for ever-diminishing supplies of oil: China.
Almost the entire Bush administration has an interest in ARAMCO.
The Boston Globe reported that in 2001 ARAMCO had signed a $140 million
multi-year contract with Halliburton, then chaired by Dick Cheney, to
develop a new oil field. Halliburton does a lot of business in Saudi
Arabia. Current estimates of Halliburton contracts or joint ventures
in the country run into the tens of billions of dollars.
So do the fortunes of some shady figures from the Bush family's past.
As recently as 1991 ARAMCO had Khalid bin Mahfouz sitting on its Supreme
Council or board of directors. Mahfouz, Saudi Arabia's former treasurer
and the nation's largest banker, has been reported in several places
to be Osama bin Laden's brother in law. However, he has denied this
and brought intense legal pressure to bear demanding retractions of
these allegations. He has major partnership investments with the multi-billion
dollar Binladin Group of companies and he is a former director of BCCI,
the infamous criminal drug-money laundering bank which performed a number
of very useful services for the CIA before its 1991 collapse under criminal
investigation by a whole lot of countries.
As Saudi Arabia's largest banker he handles the accounts of the royal
family and - no doubt - ARAMCO, while at the same time he is a named
defendant in a $1 trillion lawsuit filed by 9/11 victim families against
the Saudi government and prominent Saudi officials who, the suit alleges,
were complicit in the 9/11 attacks.
Both BCCI and Mahfouz have historical connections to the Bush family
dating back to the 1980s. Another bank (one of many) connected to Mahfouz
- the InterMaritime Bank - bailed out a cash-starved Harken Energy in
1987 with $25 million. After the rejuvenated Harken got a no-bid oil
lease in 1991, CEO George W. Bush promptly sold his shares in a pump-and-dump
scheme and made a whole lot of money.
Knowing all of this, there's really no good reason why the CIA should
be too upset, is there? It was only a long-term proprietary and deep-cover
NOC - well established and consistently producing "take" from
ARAMCO (and who knows what else in Saudi Arabia). It was destroyed with
a motive of personal vengeance (there may have been other motives) by
someone inside the White House.
From the CIA's point of view, at a time when Saudi Arabia is one of
the three or four countries of highest interest to the US, the Plame
operation was irreplaceable.

... I have become aware of journalistic colleagues being mugged (without
any theft involved) on the streets of Washington and London. Could these
have been warnings to those who have written extensively about the misdeeds
of the Bush cabal? Possibly. As the United States continues to sink into
a Third World-style dictatorship, we can expect more harassment of journalists
and political activists.
Unless, that is, Rove is deep-sixed as a matter of political necessity
to shore up Bush's Christian Right base. Washington is awash with stories,
including those from the normally pro-Bush conservative Washington Times
group, of Rove's Hooveresque off-hours antics (as in J. Edgar Hoover).
Gee, Karl, how are you going to square that with the good Reverends Robertson
and Falwell?

George Bush's Brain
by Sander Hicks
originally published by Heads Magazine, Toronto

Hiding the truth in "plain sight"

Karl Rove dirty tricks that leak the true material in a way that discredits
the facts.

-- the leaked Cocaine / "W" allegation (in 2000) to an author
with a felony conviction (who then became the issue, not the W's use of
cocaine) Rove's leaking of the truth of Bush and cocaine to convicted
felon James Hatfield for his book Fortunate Son in 1999 (see the film
Horns and Haloes for an excellent account of this).

www.sanderhicks.com/dvd.html
Horns and Haloes
a film about Jim Hatfield's book "Fortunate Son"Other dirty
tricks from the Rove propaganda machine???

-- the "fake" National Guard memos that accurately described
Bush going AWOL (the typography has become the issue)

-- some of the bogus 9/11 truth efforts are a manifestation
of this very cynical strategy -- put some of the truth out there, but
in a manner that is easy for folks to see throughit). Bogus 9/11 complicity claims that distract
from excellent evidence proven beyond reasonable doubt and make 9/11 skepticism
appear to be kooky science fiction hallucinations

One thing is certain about the CBS documents: If they are not real, then they were prepared by someone who had enough inside information to make them look almost real, but who also knew enough to include a few small telltale signs that might point to their inauthenticity - clues that might be overlooked by a news organization racing to put out an important, timely story under competitive pressures.

It's striking that the critique of the documents appeared on the Internet just hours after CBS aired them, and that the person claiming to be a document expert turned out to be an attorney with strong GOP connections who had no such credentials. How was this man able so quickly to produce his critique, and how did the story grow so quickly to overtake the basic questions about the president's own murky past performance? Did Rove's well-documented history of aggressive last-minute campaign ploys have anything to do with this episode? And why, despite all the questions, has Bush never offered a detailed accounting of his doings in those missing years? That's a news story no one yet has tackled.

Hurley – Democrat Maurice Hinchey has turned
an army of right-wing bloggers into a quivering mass of indignation.
Hinchey suggested that presidential political mastermind
Karl Rove is behind the fake documents that brought down several top executives
at CBS. The controversy led to the early retirement of longtime anchor
Dan Rather, many believe.
The remarks came at a session on Social Security in
Ithaca on Sunday, but the comments didn't stay in Ithaca very long. An
operative with the littlegreenfootballs.com Web site had recorded Hinchey's
comments. Within hours, a transcript of his comments about Rove and a
copy of the audiotape were on the Web site. By yesterday afternoon, the
site had more than 1,400 responses to his comments.
At the speech Sunday, Hinchey said the media has been
attacked and manipulated.
"Probably the most flagrant example of that is
the way they set up Dan Rather," he can be heard saying in the audio
clip.
"Now, I mean, I have my own beliefs about how that
happened: It originated with Karl Rove, in my belief, in the White House
... . Once they did that, then it undermined everything else about Bush's
draft dodging. … That had the effect of taking the whole issue away."
The documents in question addressed Bush's military
service in Alabama in 1972 while on leave from the Texas National Guard.
Ultimately, CBS could not prove that the memos were authentic.
The bloggers were quick to respond to Hinchey's remarks.
"This guy needs a clue-by-blog and wake up to being
a mature person," wrote "mglazer." "The old days of
sitting in a little town hall and pandering to your constituents with
LIES is no longer OK, acceptable or ignored – we can ALL HEAR what
you say now."
There was this from "mich-again": "Rove
isn't stupid enough to offer up those documents and actually think CBS
would not discover the ruse. How freaking ignorant are these people?"
And this from "christheprofessor": "I
say Republicans in the House of Representative should demand an investigation
of his, er, evidence, and then have him censured."
The congressman from Hurley said he expected his comments
might end up on the Internet.
"I knew that was going to happen when I saw this
guy sitting in the front row with a tape recorder. They have been following
me around taping everything I say in the hope they can find something
to use against me," he said yesterday.
He stands by his comments.
"I didn't allege I had any facts. I said this is
what I believe and take it for what it's worth," said Hinchey, now
in his seventh term. He pointed to the fake documents in the CBS case
as well as a scandal involving a leak from the Bush administration that
revealed the name of an undercover CIA agent to the media.
"My theory is they came from the same place, which
is the Bush administration and Karl Rove," he said.
The White House did not return a call for comment by
deadline last evening.
Hinchey said he has no plans to stop making allegations
against Rove and the Bush administration.
"What we are seeing is very new and very dangerous,"
Hinchey said. "No administration has attempted to manipulate the
facts and information and to manipulate the news media to distort the
facts ... as what we are seeing in this administration."

http://xymphora.blogspot.com
Saturday, September 18, 2004

Robert Sam Anson suggests that there is something fishy about the
blogger campaign to attack the CBS memos, referring to a Freeper posting
by someone named 'Buckhead' a little over three hours after the CBS
report first aired:"First (leaving aside how suspiciously well
Buckhead puts sentences together for a righty blogger), there's the
extraordinary, yeah, boggling, knowledge of typewriting arcana. More
remarkable still are the circumstances under which discernment occurred.
Namely, viewing the document on a TV screen from a presumed distance
of six to a dozen feet. Folks who make their living at this sort of
thing rely on magnifying glasses, if not microscopes. And they don’t
venture opinions unless the document's in their puss.
Then there's the warp speed with which Buckhead discerned monkey business.
The last big document mess was the trove that conned Seymour Hersh into
believing Jack Kennedy signed a contract with Marilyn Monroe agreeing
to pay a hundred grand in consideration of her shutting up about their
adventures between the sheets, as well as his pillow talk of owing the
1960 election to the good offices of Chicago mob boss Sam (Momo) Giancana.
Their exposure (in which your correspondent had a walk-on) took weeks.
And those documents were nutso on their face.
Another timing oddity which may or may not be related to the mysterious
Buckhead, depending on your choice of villain, is the Pentagon's release
of allegedly newly-discovered records of Mr. Bush’s flight hours
and middling piloting abilities one day almost to the minute before
Mr. Rather’s report—following four months of insisting there
were no more documents to disgorge. Second coincidence: The Pentagon
release came hours after the Boston Globe, poring through yet other
records, reported that Mr. Bush 'fell well short of meeting his military
obligation' by failing to report to a Boston-area Guard unit after he
enrolled in the Harvard Business School, and by earlier ducking out
on required training and drills for a total of nine months. Either could
have landed Mr. Bush on full-time active duty for two years, potentially
in Vietnam. But he received no punishment whatsoever.
Finally, there's a detail that appears to have escaped press notice:
The Web site where Buckhead's posting appeared also happens to be the
repository for anti-Jew, anti-Catholic, anti-homosexual, anti-John Kerry
rants by Jerome R. Corsi, Ph.D. And whom, you ask, is Dr. Corsi? Co-author
of the best-selling Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out
Against John Kerry, that's who."After digesting that, read what
PR Week has to say:"Creative Response Concepts (CRC), the VA-based
agency promoting the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, used right-wing
blogs and news sites to turn a CBS report casting doubt on President
George W. Bush's National Guard service into a potential black eye for
both the network and the Democrats.
A CRC client, the Cybercast News Service (CNS), was among the first
to voice suspicion that documents suggesting Bush had received preferential
treatment in the Guard were forgeries.
'After the CBS story aired, [CNS] called typographical experts, got
them on the record that these papers were fishy, and posted a story
by 3pm Thursday,' said CRC SVP Keith Appell. 'We were immediately in
contact with [Matt] Drudge, who loved the story.'
CRC worked with CNS and the Media Research Center, another media watchdog
client, to push the story into the mainstream press.
'We've been communicating with bloggers and news websites to make sure
they know it isn't just Rush Limbaugh and Matt Drudge who are raising
questions,' added CRC president Greg Mueller."After someone probably
pointed out that the Official Story is that populist bloggers did the
CBS story all by their lonesomes, and that PR firms are paid to stick
to the Official Story and not blow their own horns, CRC issued a sort
of retraction:"Please understand, we never meant to imply that
the blogosphere is something we did, or even could, control or direct.
No one controls the bloggers. The extraordinary depth and breadth of
their talent and resources only breeds one thing: a fierce independence
much needed in the country. They are a force the PR industry and news
media need to pay greater attention to.
In the interview with PR Week, we tried to communicate that the bloggers,
and then CNS www.cnsnews.com, were moving this story, which we then
began pushing to conservative media, news websites and 'mainstream'
press.
If anything, we're just proud that our client, CNS News, provided some
hard news reporting to add some gasoline to the already rampant wildfire
that the bloggers had started. Do we deserve credit for that? Not nearly
as much as the guys at PowerLine, Instapundit, LittleGreenFootballs,
INDCJournal, Allahpundit, and so many others deserve."The conspiracy
is starting to unravel. CBS was attacked, not by bloggers, but by swift
boats. As I wrote a few days ago on what I called the 'quick blogger
response team', the coordinated way in which the bloggers worked, together
with their amazing speed and instant expertise on old typewriters and
fonts, not to mention the way their postings were seamlessly integrated
into the mainstream media, indicates that the attack on the CBS memos
was not the bottom-up populist unorganized campaign that has been depicted
by the right-wing media, but nothing less than a propaganda blitz by
the Republican Party to deflect attention from some very embarrassing
material by attacking the messenger. It should not be a surprise that
PR firms would fasten on blogging as a method of disguising the fact
that the message is coming from a partisan source. After all, deceiving
people is their job. However, from now on Americans should never assume
that just because information is coming from bloggers that it is not
part of an organized campaign of disinformation.
posted at 3:47 AM permanent linkWednesday, September 15, 2004

For a scandal known as Rathergate, because the superscript th was allegedly
unavailable when CBS's memos were supposed to have been typed, the comments
of Lt. Col. Jerry Killian's former secretary, Marian Carr Knox, are
somewhat ironic (my emphasis):"Knox said signs of forgery abound
in the four memos.
She said the typeface on the documents did not match either of the two
typewriters that she used during her time with the Guard. She identified
those machines as a mechanical Olympia typewriter and the IBM Selectric
that replaced it in the early 1970s.
She spoke fondly of the Olympia, which she said had a key with the 'th'
superscript character that has been the focus of much debate in the
CBS memos."The issue of the superscript th, which got the bloggers
in the door on the whole forgery issue, was phony. Not only was the
superscript th available at the time, it was available to Killian. On
the other hand, Knox's view that the type on the memos doesn't match
the type on either of her two typewriters is very compelling evidence
that the memos were recreated on modern equipment. We know they must
have been recreated rather than completely made up because Knox is very
specific that she typed memos containing 'the same information' that
is in the CBS memos. Why would anyone take the risk of recreating the
memos if they had access to the original memos?
posted at 11:27 PM permanent link

Assuming for the moment that the CBS documents are forgeries, but, as
the former secretary of Lieutenant Colonel Killian says, accurately
reflect his thoughts and are likely based on the contents of his original
notes (and watch for reports of this in the disgusting American media
to simply say the documents are forgeries, without reference to the
vital fact that the contents are substantially true), why would the
forger go to all the trouble of making a forgery? If he had access to
the original notes, and he must have had such access in order to make
substantively accurate forgeries, why not send them to CBS? The only
reason you would make a forgery, and a forgery which was discovered
with very suspicious speed and detail, is if you were trying to undermine
the credibility of the content of the notes. If you knew the substance
of the notes was going to be released, and might be an election issue,
releasing the notes yourself in a forged form is the perfect way to
diffuse the crisis. Everyone is now watching the spectacle of the alleged
shenanigans, and completely ignoring the substantive issues raised by
the notes.
posted at 2:52 AM permanent link

"Why Bush Left Texas" by Russ Baker is the first article to
seriously consider the deep reasons for the inconsistencies in Bush's
military record and the extremely odd way in which this record has been
presented to the American people. Finally, someone has stopped beating
around the Bush (this article should have been written by somebody -
or at least somebody other than James Hatfield, who was on the story
and may have uncovered even more if not for his unfortunate 'suicide'
- five or six years ago). Baker writes:
"A months-long investigation, which includes examination of hundreds
of government-released documents, interviews with former Guard members
and officials, military experts and Bush associates, points toward the
conclusion that Bush's personal behavior was causing alarm among his
superior officers and would ultimately lead to his fleeing the state
to avoid a physical exam he might have had difficulty passing."
and (my emphasis):
"If it is demonstrated that profound behavioral problems marred
Bush's wartime performance and even cut short his service, it could
seriously challenge Bush's essential appeal as a military steward and
guardian of societal values. It could also explain the incomplete, contradictory
and shifting explanations provided by the Bush camp for the President's
striking invisibility from the military during the final two years of
his six-year military obligation. And it would explain the savagery
and rapidity of the attack on the CBS documents."
and:
"It is notable that in 1972, the military was in the process of
introducing widespread drug testing as part of the annual physical exams
that pilots would undergo."
and, explaining the reason why witnesses are so hard to find:
"One of the difficulties in getting to the truth about what really
took place during this period is the frequently expressed fear of retribution
from the Bush organization. Many sources refuse to speak on the record,
or even to have their knowledge communicated publicly in any way."The
usual Republican stooges are going to demand a lot more specifics than
are contained in this article, but it is an excellent start. Somebody
still needs to find out whether the drug test was a particular worry
to Bush because of other drug-related legal difficulties he was having
in Texas (the fact that a drug test at the time would not have been
able to detect cocaine use is irrelevant if Bush thought it might and
couldn't afford to take the risk that a positive drug test would put
him in breach of the terms of some conditional sentence he was purporting
to fulfill). The reckless drug use, general lack of care about other
people, and the feckless wasting of chances given to him solely because
of the position of his father are all important examples of Bush's irresponsibility,
a trait which continues to this day. Bush's irresponsibility is the
governing characteristic of his personality. His handlers know this,
and hiding it has been Rove's chief occupation for the past four years
(note that the secretary who may have typed the originals of the CBS
memos says that the CBS memos are forgeries, but the contents of them
accurately reflect the thoughts of one of Bush's commanders, a combination
of facts which indicates to me that the faulty memos may have been supplied
to CBS as part of a dirty tricks campaign to hide their content under
a Rove-directed campaign of bloggers against the form of the memos).
Bush's ignoring the memo presented to him by the CIA in August 2001
which referred to the specific danger of an attack like September 11
is just another manifestation of this profound personality disorder.
The fact that a person with Bush's specific flaws is running his campaign
as representing the responsible guardian of the American people against
the evils of the world of terrorism is nothing short of obscene.
posted at 2:26 AM permanent linkTuesday, September 14, 2004

Some have surmised that the entire CBS documents scandal is another
dirty trick by Karl Rove. The idea is that Rove circulated embarrassing
documents that were going to come out anyway, but altered them so the
right-wing bloggers could make their arguments that the documents were
forgeries. The whole forgery issue would then provide a smokescreen
for the real contents of the documents. While I have yet to see any
evidence that the documents were indeed forgeries, and the fact you
can recreate similar looking documents on a computer today just proves
that fonts don't change (which is the whole point of fonts!), the idea
that Rove might try such a trick isn't as crazy as it seems. James H.
Hatfield, the suicided author of the Bush biography 'Fortunate Son',
had a very similar Rove experience. From Barbelith Webzine:"They
produced a run of 45,000 copies, and this time, with Hicks as a mouthpiece,
Hatfield did not spare the anonymity of his sources. 'I know that Sander
Hicks, my publisher, has stated in interviews and in the introduction
to the new, updated second edition of Fortunate Son that (Karl) Rove
was one of my sources, but I cannot personally deny or confirm.' And
so we get to the alleged villain of the piece. Karl Rove, ex-Nixonite
and Bush camp spin-doctor described by Hatfield himself as 'the ultimate
dirty trickster'. Also implicated was Clay Johnson, advisor and long-time
friend to Bush. Hicks' and Hatfield's version goes like this: when Bush
made his hasty admission and the media seemed ready to pounce, Rove
realised he needed to find a way to remove discussion of Bush's drug
past from the national debate so thoroughly that even Bush himself couldn't
bring it up again. Right around August 1999, when Bush made that press
conference blunder, J. H. Hatfield's biography Fortunate Son was in
its final stages with St. Martin's Press.According to Hatfield, during
the writing of Fortunate Son he had contacted Rove and Johnson and interviewed
them at length. Hatfield mistakenly assumed that Johnson and Rove weren't
aware of his 1988 conviction for solicitation of capital murder. Rove
and Johnson realised that, in Hatfield, they had found their solution
to Bush's drug problem. A flawed author."

The big buzz on the Internet and in the papers over the past 24 hours
has been the fallout from the "60 Minutes" story this week
on President Bush's service (or lack thereof) in the Texas National
Guard. In particular, scores of blogs and Matt Drudge have honed in
on accusations that documents obtained by "60 Minutes" bolstering
the case that Bush did not fulfill his duties were faked. The right
wing FreeRepublic website posted this theory:
"Every single one of the memos to file regarding Bush's failure
to attend a physical and meet other requirements is in a proportionally
spaced font, probably Palatine or Times New Roman. In 1972 people used
typewriters for this sort of thing (especially in the military), and
typewriters used mono-spaced fonts."
The post went on to say, "[T]hese documents are forgeries, run
through a copier for 15 generations to make them look old. This should
be pursued aggressively."
It should.
The dominant thinking seems to be that if the documents were forged,
they were leaked in an effort to harm Bush. But it is worth considering
another possibility: the Bush team itself may have "leaked"
the forged documents. The whole affair seems to bear what is known as
"The Mark of Rove," as in Karl Rove, senior advisor to President
Bush; Karl Rove the grand wizard of dirty tricks.
It is commonly known that one of Bush's greatest weaknesses in the presidential
campaign is Vietnam. While John Kerry fought in the war and earned (deservedly
or not) three Purple Hearts, a young George W. Bush enlisted in the
Texas National Guard with help, it turns out, from then-Texas Speaker
of the House Ben Barnes. Barnes, of course, was a central figure in
the "60 Minutes" story, as he admitted for the first time
to the media to intervening to get Bush into the Guard and keep him
out of Vietnam.
As investigations by the "Boston Globe" and others have uncovered,
Bush's military record was shoddy at best, criminal at worst. He may
be the first president who could have been tried for going AWOL. To
counter Kerry's "war hero" image, Bush supporters have launched
an attack campaign on Kerry's record in Vietnam, questioning his account
of his service. They have also portrayed him as having betrayed veterans
when he spoke out against the war in 1971 in testimony before the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee.
If Rove is behind the leaking of the alleged "forged" documents
shown on "60 Minutes", it could well be phase two of a strategy
to kill all criticism of President Bush for his record during the Vietnam
War era. If the documents turn out to be fakes, the story will no longer
be about Bush's military record but about who forged the documents.
In fact that is essentially what is happening already. It won't be long
before fingers start pointing toward the Kerry camp.
If you think this sounds like a nutty conspiracy theory, you probably
haven't been following Karl Rove's career; a career replete with dirty
tricks and sophisticated, preemptive political strikes.
Remember the allegations that Bush was arrested in 1972 on drug possession
charges, specifically cocaine? Today it is basically a non-story. But
it is worth looking back at why.
In 1999, St. Martin's Press published a critical biography of Bush titled
"Fortunate Son". The book quoted an unnamed "high-ranking
advisor to Bush," who revealed Bush's 1972 drug bust. The source
told author J.H. Hatfield, Bush "was ordered by a Texas judge to
perform community service in exchange for expunging his record showing
illicit drug use."
Hatfield later revealed that his source was none other than Karl Rove.
That might seem ridiculous, considering Rove's lifelong loyalty to the
Bushes and the fact that he now has an office adjacent to Bush's in
the White House. But leaking the story to Hatfield essentially discredited
the story and sent it into the annals of conspiracy theory. Soon after
the book was published and just as St. Martin's was preparing a high
profile launching of the book, the "Dallas Morning News" ran
a story revealing that Hatfield was a felon who had served time in jail.
In response, St. Martin's pulled the book.
" When the media stumbled upon a story regarding George W. Bush's
1972 cocaine possession arrest, Rove had to find a way to kill the story.
He did so by destroying the messenger," says Sander Hicks, the
former publisher of Soft Skull, which re-published "Fortunate Son."
"They knew the stories of Dubya's cocaine and drink busts would
come out, so they made certain that it would come out of the mouth of
a guy they could smear," said journalist Greg Palast, who wrote
the forward to the final edition of the book.
If Rove was Hatfield's source, he certainly wasn't trying to expose
Bush's drug use. Instead he was trying to discredit and ultimately kill
the story. And it worked. Few reporters since have dared to touch the
story.
Consider also the history of Rove's dirty tricks, chronicled by James
Moore and Wayne Slater in their book "Bush's Brain: How Karl Rove
Made George W. Bush Presidential."
In 1986, according to the book, Rove told reporters that someone had
bugged his office where he was campaign manager for Texas gubernatorial
candidate Bill Clements. On the morning of a major debate Rove called
a press conference. He said, "Obviously I don't know who did this.
But there is no doubt in my mind that the only ones who would benefit
from this detailed, sensitive information would be the political opposition."
The press quickly assumed the bugging was done by Clements' opponent,
Mark White, who was leading in the polls. By election day, Rove's candidate
won and the source of the bug was never found -- but many reporters
later concluded that Rove himself had placed it.
Four years ago during the Bush-Gore race, the Gore camp mysteriously
obtained sensitive campaign materials from the Bush campaign including
a video of the Texas governor prepping for a debate and detailed campaign
strategy notes. Rove soon accused the Gore campaign of secretly taping
Bush. Later a former employee of a Bush campaign adviser admitted supplying
the information to Gore.
In trademark fashion, Rove's role in the case was never clear. He never
leaves fingerprints behind. It is known as the "Mark of Rove."
It may well have returned in the form of Times New Roman font on some
forged documents.
A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
Mike Burke is a producer for the national radio and TV show Democracy
Now! He can be reached at mike @democracynow.org

www.davidcogswell.com/Reviews/FortunateSonReview.html
Behind the Bushes
Fortunate Son by J.H. Hatfield
Reviewed by David Cogswell
By David Cogswell

A felony conviction can certainly pose a credibility problem. When
it became publicly known that J.H. Hatfield, the author of the biography
of George W. Bush Fortunate Son, had been convicted of complicity in
an attempted murder, the book itself and not its subject became the
event. It was recalled by its publisher, St. Martin's Press, and turned
into "furnace fodder," according to the publisher's public
statements.
Most press coverage of the book focused on the author's allegation that
Bush had been convicted of cocaine possession in 1972, had served a
term of public service in atonement and had then had his record expunged
as a favor to the Bush family. This was presumably the most potentially
scandalous part of the book, the point reporters seized upon to show
the extreme dimensions of the book. When the criminal history of the
author became public, the allegations were widely dismissed along with
the rest of the book.
Though an embarrassed press viewed it as an anticlimax to a shut case,
"Fortunate Son" was republished January 1 as a paperback by
a "punk" publisher Soft Skull Press, a Lower East Side venture
begun in 1992 by 28-year-old Sander Hicks. The publisher said he believed
in the credibility of the book, that the author had the documentation
to prove his case in a libel court. He said he was willing to take the
chance that the Bush clan would never take the chance of allowing the
inquiry that would be set off by a libel trial. The new edition of book
was published January 1, 2000, a few months after its first publication.
As of May, no libel case has been filed. It is hard to believe the Bush
family would not use any legal means to stop these damaging allegations
that could endanger the presidential aspirations of its chosen successor
to the throne, if it could. It therefore lends some credence to the
assertion of the publisher. He, in fact, is the one who is putting his
money, his company and his reputation on the line. It is unlikely the
fledgling company could survive a judgment against it in a libel case.
Punk indeed! To openly confront one of the most powerful political families
in recent American history -- one whose patriarch is former president,
vice president, director of the CIA, head of the Republican National
Committee during the Watergate scandal, Kissinger protege and ambassador
to Beijing during Nixon's secret war on Cambodia -- is either extremely
brave, or painfully naive.
In the absence of legal action following the re-publication of the book,
the silence is deafening. If only the single, damaging cocaine allegation
were unprovable, it is reasonable to assume that appropriate legal action
would be taken. George W. Bush was asked about the book in an interview
by Brill's Content. He called the book "outrageous." But he
did not say the allegations were false. He spoke instead of the "fraudulent
nature" of author, and said there is "no recourse." Whether
or not Dubya knows it, surely his handlers, surely the canny Karl Rove
knows that if the material is slanderous, there is a simple recourse.
In slander cases, the burden of proof is on the defendant. If he cannot
prove his charges, Bush wins. Bush has asserted that all the men executed
in Texas under his watch had "access to the courts," now he
would have us believe that he, who has had every privilege of wealth
and power, does not.
Considering the stakes -- choosing the man who will occupy the most
powerful office in the world -- it seems worth looking at the book to
see if it stands or falls on the merit of its arguments and its documentation.
Hatfield is not applying for the job of president, but George W. Bush
is. Hatfield would not be the first person convicted of a crime who
wrote a valuable book. Readers are certainly able to bring the tools
of critical thinking to these arguments, just as they should to any
argument by any politician who has not been convicted of a crime. The
public issue is not who Hatfield is, but who George W. Bush is.
The new edition has a new forward in which the author confesses his
own crime up front, in colorful detail, and it is not pretty. It is,
however, undeniable after a couple of paragraphs that the clarity of
his prose is gripping. This impression is borne out as the main body
of the story unfolds. Hatfield is a powerful writer. The story is compelling,
coherent and bolstered by a mountain of documentation.
After reading press reports, one of the most surprising things about
the book is that it is not merely a smear. The book paints a rounded
portrait, the Bushes emerge as people, not monsters. Its bias is clearly
anti-Bush, but the case is well-constructed. It goes into detail about
the SEC investigation of W's alleged insider trading, the Bush family's
involvement in the Savings & Loan and BCCIA scandals, W's job as
hatchet-man for his father's presidential campaigns and a great many
other worthy scandals.
The second publication has two other additions, one is a 54-page index
of source notes that was dropped from the original publication by St.
Martin's in order to get the book to press before its competition. The
notes provide a roadmap for any research into the information in the
book.
The new edition also has an introduction by Toby Rogers, a Quill Award-winning
journalist, and author and editor Nick Mamatas. In it, they document
additional embarrassments, such as the fact that W's grandfather Prescott
Bush and great-grandfather George Herbert Walker were directors of Union
Banking Corporation, which was seized under the Trading with the Enemy
Act in 1942 for its contribution to Nazi war efforts, including raising
$50 million for the Nazi rearmament effort by selling Nazi war bonds.
The cocaine controversy is only a minor part of the story. The introduction
begins with an informed review of the history of the institution of
freedom of the press. It quotes a statement of Milton that was the foundation
of his argument against censorship: "Though all the winds of doctrine
were let loose to play upon the earth, so truth be in the field, we
do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength.
Let her and falsehood grapple; who ever knew truth put to the worse,
in a free and open encounter."
Any student of history knows that crime is a relative term in the world
of politics. Convicted felon though he is, J.H. Hatfield has performed
a service that is vital in a democracy. He has written an informative
history of a man who would be president. Call it atonement.
A version of this review was originally published in The American Book
Review

New York Times
September 16, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST Pre-emptive Paranoia

By MAUREEN DOWD

[H] ere's how bad off the Democrats are: They're cowering behind closed
doors, whispering that if it should ever turn out that Republicans are
behind this, it would be so exquisitely Machiavellian, so beyond what
Democrats are capable of, they should just fold and concede the election
now - before the Republicans have to go to the trouble of stealing it
again.
There's no evidence - it's just a preposterous, paranoid fantasy at
this point. But it speaks to the jitters of the Democrats that they're
consumed with speculation about whether Karl Rove, the master of dirty
tricks and surrogate sleaze, could have set up CBS in a diabolical pre-emptive
strike to undermine damaging revelations about Bush 43's privileged
status and vanishing act in the National Guard, and his odd refusal
to take his required physical when ordered.
In this vast left-wing conspiracy theory, Mr. Rove takes real evidence
on W.'s shirking and transfers it to documents doomed to be exposed
as phony (thereby undermining the real goods), then funnels it through
third parties to Dan Rather, Bush 41's nemesis on Iran-contra. A perfect
bank shot.
The secretary for W.'s squadron commander in the Texas Guard told The
Times that the information in the disputed memos is correct - it's just
the memos that seem fake.
"It looks like someone may have read the originals and put that
together,'' said a lucid 86-year-old Marian Carr Knox, who was flown
up to New York yesterday by beleaguered CBS News executives.
She told Mr. Rather that her boss, Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, wrote a "cover-your-back
file,'' a "personal journal'' to keep a record about the politically
connected Bush in his charge. She said the contents of that mirrored
the CBS documents, but she said those documents were not on the right
forms and contained Army terms rather than Air National Guard argot.
She confirmed that young Bush had disobeyed a direct order from Colonel
Killian to take a physical.
"It was a big no-no to not follow orders,'' she said, adding that
the Bush scion's above-the-rules attitude caused some snickers and resentment
among fellow officers.
Those who suspect Mr. Rove note that when he was Bill Clements's campaign
strategist in a 1986 governor's race in Texas, he was accused of bugging
his own office to distract from a debate, according to James Moore and
Wayne Slater, authors of "Bush's Brain.'' They said it turned the
election because after that, the Democrat could not get any attention.
Was the same scenario playing out yesterday evening on CNN? After a
five-minute report on the CBS memo controversy, CNN spent about 30 seconds
reporting that two more marines had been killed in Iraq.
House Republicans started clamoring for a Congressional inquiry into
the documents used by "60 Minutes,'' saying it might be an attempt
to manipulate the election. (Isn't that what the Democrats are scared
the Republicans are doing?)
These same Republicans never wanted investigations into missing W.M.D.,
why Congress passed a Medicare bill based on faulty figures, Abu Ghraib
or even whether those Swiftie guys were lying, for Pete's sake.
The Democratic paranoia is a measure of the intimidation the West Wing
is wielding in a race where
John Kerry can't seem to take advantage of any of the Bush administration's
increasingly calamitous blunders.
The administration has been so dazzling in misleading the public with
audacious, mendacious malarkey that the Democrats fear the Bushies are
capable of any level of deceit.
Iraq is a vision of hell, and the Republicans act as if it's a model
kitchen. The president and vice president brag about liberating Iraqis
and reassure us that they are stopping terrorist violence at its source
and inspiring democracy in the region by bringing it to blood-drenched
Iraq.
But what they haven't mentioned is that they have known since July that
their rosy scenarios are as bogus as their W.M.D. That's when the president
received a national intelligence estimate that spelled out "a dark
assessment of prospects" for stability and governance in Iraq in
the next 18 months, as Douglas Jehl wrote in today's Times <http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/16/politics/16intel.html>
. Worst-case estimates include civil war or anarchy.
Unlike the president, the young men and women trying to stay alive in
the unraveling chaos of Iraq can't count on their daddies to get them
out of the line of fire.
Thomas L. Friedman is on book leave.Copyright 2004 <http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html>
The New York Times Company <http://www.nytco.com/>

THE LYNCHING OF DAN RATHER
On British TV, Dan feared the price of "asking questions"
By Greg Palast
September 21, 2004 00:29

"It's that fear that keeps journalists from asking the toughest
of the tough questions," the aging American journalist told the
British television audience.
In June 2002, Dan Rather looked old, defeated, making a confession he
dare not speak on American TV about the deadly censorship -- and self-censorship
-- which had seized US newsrooms. After September 11, news on
the US tube was bound and gagged. Any reporter who stepped out
of line, he said, would be professionally lynched as un-American.
"It's an obscene comparison," he said, "but there was
a time in South Africa when people would put flaming tires around people's
necks if they dissented. In some ways, the fear is that you will
be necklaced here. You will have a flaming tire of lack of patriotism
put around your neck." No US reporter who values his neck
or career will "bore in on the tough questions."
Dan said all these things to a British audience. However, back in the
USA, he smothered his conscience and told his TV audience: "George
Bush is the President. He makes the decisions. He wants me to line up,
just tell me where."
During the war in Vietnam, Dan's predecessor at CBS, Walter Cronkite,
asked some pretty hard questions about Nixon's handling of the war in
Vietnam. Today, our sons and daughters are dying in Bush wars.
But, unlike Cronkite, Dan could not, would not, question George Bush,
Top Gun Fighter Pilot, Our Maximum Beloved Leader in the war on terror.
On the British broadcast, without his network minders snooping, you
could see Dan seething and deeply unhappy with himself for playing the
game.
"What is going on," he said, "I'm sorry to say, is a
belief that the public doesn't need to know -- limiting access, limiting
information to cover the backsides of those who are in charge of the
war. It's extremely dangerous and cannot and should not be accepted,
and I'm sorry to say that up to and including this moment of this interview,
that overwhelmingly it has been accepted by the American people. And
the current Administration revels in that, they relish and take refuge
in that."
Dan's words had a poignant personal ring for me. He was speaking
on Newsnight, BBC's nightly current affairs program, which broadcasts
my own reports. I do not report for BBC, despite its stature,
by choice. The truth is, if I want to put a hard, investigative
report about the USA on the nightly news, I have to broadcast it in
exile, from London. For Americans my broadcasts are stopped at
an electronic Berlin wall.
Indeed, Dan is in hot water for a report my own investigative team put
in Britain's Guardian papers and on BBC TV years ago. Way back
in 1999, I wrote that former Texas Lt. Governor Ben Barnes had put in
the fix for little George Bush to get out of 'Nam and into the Air Guard.
What is hot news this month in the USA is a five-year-old story to the
rest of the world. And you still wouldn't see it in the USA except
that Dan Rather, with a 60 Minutes producer, finally got fed up and
ready to step out of line. And, as Dan predicted, he stuck out
his neck and got it chopped off.
Is Rather's report accurate? Is George W. Bush a war hero or a
privileged little Shirker-in-Chief? Today I saw a goofy two page spread
in the Washington Post about a typewriter used to write a memo with
no significance to the draft-dodge story. What I haven't read
about in my own country's media is about two crucial documents supporting
the BBC/CBS story. The first is Barnes' signed and sworn affidavit
to a Texas Court, from 1999, in which he testifies to the Air Guard
fix -- which Texas Governor George W. Bush, given the opportunity, declined
to challenge.
And there is a second document, from the files of US Justice Department,
again confirming the story of the fix to keep George's white bottom
out of Vietnam. That document, shown last year in the BBC television
documentary, "Bush Family Fortunes," correctly identifies
Barnes as the bag man even before his 1999 confession.
At BBC, we also obtained a statement from the man who made the call
to the Air Guard general on behalf of Bush at Barnes' request.
Want to see the document? I've posted it at: http://www.gregpalast.com/ulf/documents/draftdodgeblanked.jpg
This is not a story about Dan Rather. The white millionaire celebrity
can defend himself without my help. This is really a story about
fear, the fear that stops other reporters in the US from following the
evidence about this Administration to where it leads. American
news guys and news gals, practicing their smiles, adjusting their hairspray
levels, bleaching their teeth and performing all the other activities
that are at the heart of US TV journalism, will look to the treatment
of Dan Rather and say, "Not me, babe." No questions
will be asked, as Dan predicted, lest they risk necklacing and their
careers as news actors burnt to death.
___________________________
"Bush Family Fortunes," the one-hour documentary taken from
Greg Palast's BBC investigative reports, including the story of George
Bush and Texas Air Guard, can be viewed, in part, at www.gregpalast.com/bff-dvd.htm
To receive more of Palast's investigative reports, sign up at www.gregpalast.com/contact.cfm

September 20, 2004|9:56 PM

Even if he did condemn some other mother’s son to Vietnam, you
had to feel for Ben Barnes.
Who Is ‘Buckhead’? Kerry Assaulter Seemed Prepped
by Robert Sam Anson

He's America's Joseph Goebbels. As a 21-year old Young Republican
in Texas, Karl Rove not only pimped for Richard Nixon's chief political
dirty tricks strategist Donald Segretti but soon caught the eye of the
incoming Republican National Committee Chairman, George H. W. Bush.
Rove's dirty tricks on behalf of Nixon's 1972 campaign catapulted Rove
onto the national stage. From his Eagle's Nest in the West Wing of the
White House, Rove now directs a formidable political dirty tricks operation
and disinformation mill.
Since his formative political years when he tried to paint World War
II B-24 pilot and hero George McGovern as a left-wing peacenik through
his mid-level career as a planter of disinformation in the media on
behalf of Texas and national GOP candidates to his current role as Dubya's
"Svengali," Rove has practiced the same style of slash and
burn politics as did his Nixonian mentor Segretti. Many of us remember
the Lincolnesque Senator Ed Muskie breaking down in tears during the
1972 campaign over Segretti-planted false stories in a New Hampshire
newspaper that accused Mrs. Muskie of being a heavy smoker, drinker,
and cusser and accused Muskie of uttering a slur in describing New Hampshire's
French Canadian population. Rove's hero also forged letters on fake
Muskie campaign letterhead, disrupted rallies and fundraising dinners,
and spread false stories about the sex lives of candidates. Segretti's
brush also smeared George McGovern, George Wallace, Shirley Chisholm,
and McGovern's first vice presidential choice, Senator Tom Eagleton.
Segretti of course did not go on to a high-level White House job --
he was sentenced to six months in federal prison for distributing illegal
campaign material.
In many respects, however, the apprentice Rove has far exceeded the
chicanery and evil-mindedness of his mentor Segretti. Rove is a tech-savvy
puppet master for Bush. Take, for example, last June's discovery of
a "lost" CD-ROM in Lafayette Park across from the White House.
Contained on the CD was a PowerPoint presentation given by White House
political director Ken Mehlman to Rove on the strategy for next Tuesday's
off-year election. The slide show showed First Brother Jeb Bush being
vulnerable in Florida. Jeb Bush later joked that the disc was part of
a plot cooked up by him and his brother to make it appear that he was
vulnerable in order to rally an otherwise complacent GOP base in the
Sunshine State. Or was it a joke? Jeb Bush and his political minions
like Katherine Harris have shown us that if anyone thinks what the GOP
has done in Florida is funny they have an incredibly sick sense of humor.
Rove's own tendency to be sick-minded originates with his mentor Segretti.
The 2000 GOP primary was a chance for Rove to hone his skills in dirty
tricks. His target then was Senator John McCain who appeared to be within
striking distance of Dubya in South Carolina after the then-GOP maverick's
surprise upset victory in New Hampshire. Rove's operation proceeded
to target McCain with false stories: McCain was a stoolie for his captors
in the Hanoi Hilton (this from a lunatic self-promoting Vietnam "veteran");
McCain fathered a black daughter out of wedlock (a despicable reference
to McCain's adopted Bangladeshi daughter); Cindy McCain's drug "abuse";
and even McCain's "homosexuality." In the spirit of Segretti,
Rove engineered a victory for Dubya but at the cost of trashing an honorable
man and his family. Muskie, McGovern, Carter, Mondale, Dukakis, Gore,
Hart, Tsongas, Clinton, Biden, Dole, Perot, and others had all seen
the Segretti/Rove slash and burn tactics before.
And Rove's penchant for fascistic demagoguery and outright lying continues
to this very day. After Paul Wellstone's sons asked that Vice President
Dick Cheney not attend the Minneapolis memorial service for their father,
mother, and sister, the White House explained that the real reason wasn't
the surviving Wellstone family's abhorrence for Cheney but the fact
the family didn't want Cheney's Secret Service protection to interfere
with public access to the service. Of course, the Rove and Ari Fleischer
disinformation machine forgot to take into account that two attendees,
Bill and Hillary Clinton, had their own Secret Service details. But
such is the case with a White House that takes its lessons from Goebbels
and the editorial staff of the old Soviet News Agency Tass.
Rove's dirty fingerprints could also be seen in the Iowa Senate race
between Tom Harkin and GOP candidate Greg Ganske. A few months ago,
a story was leaked that the Harkin campaign had employed a spy within
the Ganske campaign. To put this in a Rove context, we must go back
to the 1986 Texas gubernatorial race in which Rove's candidate Bill
Clements was taking on Democratic Governor Mark White. Just before a
debate between the two candidates, Rove spun the story that his office
had been bugged. No proof. But the insinuation that White's people had
carried out the bugging was reported by the media. In the election,
Clements defeated White. Rove stashed away more political capital into
his already heavy knapsack of ill-gotten IOUs.
During the 2000 presidential campaign, we were obviously treated to
more Rove chicanery when the following Associated Press story hit the
wires: "A woman who worked for a media company that produced ads
for President George W. Bush's campaign was indicted for secretly mailing
a videotape of Bush practicing for a debate to Vice President Al Gore's
campaign." Yes, that videotape, along with a 120-page briefing
book, just happened to turn up in Gore's headquarters as fast as the
CD-ROM turned up in Lafayette Park. The sourcerer Segretti must be very
proud of his apprentice. In 1980, no Republican bemoaned the fact that
Jimmy Carter's debate briefing book was swiped and found its way into
the hands of the Reagan-Bush campaign. In Rove's world, its only an
affront when someone "steals" your own campaign secrets and
not when your are on the receiving end of a heist.
"If you're not with me, you're against me." Bush's binary
view of "good and evil" and "friend and enemy" sits
well with the Rove strategy. Georgia's conservative but libertarian-minded
Representative Bob Barr found out about this in last August's primary
when his GOP primary opponent John Linder began spreading around stories
that Barr was "soft on terrorism." Because Barr was skeptical
about a number of aspects of the Bush-Ashcroft USA PATRIOT Act, he became
a target for the Rove machine. However, it was likely that Barr became
a target earlier on when he supported Steve Forbes against Bush in the
2000 primary. Bush apparently means to say, "If you've not always
been with me, you're against me." It must have really been a dilemma
for Bush and Rove to have to come to the support of John Sununu, Jr.
in the New Hampshire Senate race. Although Daddy made George W. unceremoniously
give the axe to Sununu's father as White House Chief of Staff during
the Bush 41 administration, the man who the junior Sununu defeated in
the primary, Bob Smith, was even more of a problem. He had the temerity
to quit the Republican Party in 2000 and run against Dubya for President.
So in Bushspeak, which is obviously borrowed from Forrest Gump's scripts,
"if you're less with me than the other guy, you're more against
me."
Undoubtedly, Rove was also behind the campaign to "get" Georgia
Representative Cynthia McKinney who was the first nationally-known politician
to question what Bush may have known beforehand about 9-11. She was
defeated by a former Republican state judge who had supported the wacky
Alan Keyes for President in 2000. Never mind, McKinney was "less
with Bush" than Keyes, so it was more important to get McKinney
who was "more against" Bush.
In all seriousness, rewarding the GOP on November 5 will only increase
the appetite of Rove to amass more and more power into the White House.
The advent of a Democratic-controlled Senate and House might even begin
to spell the end of the road for Segretti's star pupil. German opposition
figures in the mid-1930s often lamented the fact that they could have
stopped the rise of the Nazis if only they had been more united in a
common front when they had a chance. However, they fell prey to the
media manipulation of Goebbels and fought among themselves more than
they did against the menace from the far right. We Americans also have
an early opportunity to stem an out-of-control and anti-constitutional
regime with the Rasputin-like Rove at the after steerage helm of our
ship of state. That opportunity presents itself next Tuesday--Election
Day.
Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and
columnist. He wrote the introduction to Forbidden Truth.
Madsen can be reached at: WMadsen777@aol.com

SECAUCUS -- I smell something - and it ain't a copy of the Qu'ran
sopping
wet from being stuck in a toilet in Guantanamo Bay. It's the ink drying
on
Scott McClellan's resignation, and in an only partly imperfect world,
it
would be drifting out over Washington, and imminently.
Last Thursday, General Richard Myers, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of
Staff, and Donald Rumsfeld's go-to guy whenever the situation calls
for the
kind of gravitas the Secretary himself can't supply, told reporters
at the
Pentagon that rioting in Afghanistan was related more to the on-going
political reconciliation process there, than it was to a controversial
note
buried in the pages of Newsweek claiming that the government was
investigating whether or not some nitwit interrogator at Gitmo really
had
desecrated a Muslim holy book.
But Monday afternoon, while offering himself up to the networks for
a series
of rare, almost unprecedented sit-down interviews on the White House
lawn,
Press Secretary McClellan said, in effect, that General Myers, and the
head
of the after-action report following the disturbances in Jalalabad,
Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry, were dead wrong. The Newsweek story,
McClellan said, "has done damage to our image abroad and it has
done damage
to the credibility of the media and Newsweek in particular. People have
lost
lives. This report has had serious consequences."
Whenever I hear Scott McClellan talking about 'media credibility,' I
strain
to remember who it was who admitted Jeff Gannon to the White House press
room and called on him all those times.
Whenever I hear this White House talking about 'doing to damage to our
image
abroad' and how 'people have lost lives,' I strain to remember who it
was
who went traipsing into Iraq looking for WMD that will apparently turn
up
just after the Holy Grail will - and at what human cost.
Newsweek's version of this story has varied from the others over the
last
two years - ones in The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Washington Post,
and
British and Russian news organizations - only in that it quoted a government
source who now says he didn't have firsthand knowledge of whether or
not the
investigation took place (oops, sorry, shoulda mentioned that, buh-bye).
All
of its other government connections - the ones past which it ran the
story -
have gone from saying nothing like 'don't print this, it ain't true'
or
'don't print this, it may be true but it'll start riots,' to looking
slightly confused and symbolically saying 'Newsweek? Newsweek who?'
Whatever I smell comes from this odd sequence of events: Newsweek gets
blasted by the White House, apologizes over the weekend but doesn't
retract
its story. Then McClellan offers his Journalism 101 outdoor seminar
and
blasts the magazine further. Finally, just before 5 PM Monday, the Dan
Rather drama replaying itself in its collective corporate mind, Newsweek
retracts.
I'm always warning about the logical fallacy - the illusion that just
because one event follows another, the latter must have necessarily
caused
the former. But when I wondered tonight on Countdown if it applied here,
Craig Crawford reassured me. "The dots connect."
The real point, of course, is that you'd have to be pretty dumb to think
that making a threat at Gitmo akin to 'Spill the beans or we'll kill
this
Qu'ran' would have any effect on the prisoners, other than to eventually
leak out and inflame anti-American feelings somewhere. Of course, everybody
in the prosecution of the so-called 'war on terror' has done something
dumb,
dating back to the President's worst-possible-word-selection ("crusade")
on
September 16, 2001. So why wouldn't some mid-level interrogator stuck
in
Cuba think it would be a good idea to desecrate a holy book? Jack Rice,
the
former CIA special agent and now radio host, said on Countdown that
it would
be a "knuckleheaded" thing to do, but "plausible."
One of the most under-publicized analyses of 9/11 concludes that Osama
Bin
Laden assumed that the attacks on the U.S. would galvanize Islamic anger
towards this country, and they'd overthrow their secular governments
and
woo-hoo we've got an international religious war. Obviously it didn't
happen. It didn't even happen when the West went into Iraq. But if stuff
like the Newsweek version of a now two-year old tale about toilets and
Qu'rans is enough to set off rioting in the streets of countries whose
nationals were not even the supposed recipients of the 'abuse', then
weren't
those members of the military or the government with whom Newsweek vetted
the plausibility of its item, honor-bound to say "you can't print
this"?
Or would somebody rather play politics with this? The way Craig Crawford
reconstructed it, this one went similarly to the way the Killian Memos
story
evolved at the White House. The news organization turns to the
administration for a denial. The administration says nothing. The news
organization runs the story. The administration jumps on the necks of
the
news organization with both feet - or has its proxies do it for them.
That's beyond shameful. It's treasonous.
It's also not very smart. While places like the Fox News Channel (which,
only today, I finally recognized - it's the newscast perpetually running
on
the giant video screens in the movie "1984") ask how many
heads should roll
at Newsweek, it forgets in its fervor that both the story and the phony
controversy around it are not so cut-and-dried this time.
Firstly, the principal reporter on the Gitmo story was Michael Isikoff
-
"Spikey" in a different lifetime; Linda Tripp's favorite journalist,
and one
of the ten people most responsible (intentionally or otherwise) for
the
impeachment of Bill Clinton. Spikey isn't just a hero to the Right -
the
Right owes him.
And larger still, in terms of politics, this isn't well-defined, is
it? I
mean Conservatives might parrot McClellan and say 'Newsweek put this
country
in a bad light.' But they could just as easily thump their chests and
say
'See, this is what we do to those prisoners at Gitmo! You guys better
watch
your asses!'
Ultimately, though, the administration may have effected its biggest
mistake
over this saga, in making the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs look like
a liar
or naïf, just to draw a little blood out of Newsweek's hide. Either
way -
and also for that tasteless, soul-less conclusion that deaths in Afghanistan
should be lain at the magazine's doorstep - Scott McClellan should resign.
The expiration on his carton full of blank-eyed bully-collaborator act
passed this afternoon as he sat reeling off those holier-than-thou remarks.
Ah, that's what I smelled.
E-mail: KOlbermann@msnbc.com
Watch Keith each weeknight at 8 p.m. ET as he Counts down the best,
the
worst, and the oddest news stories of the day.
* May 16, 2005 | 11:31 a.m. ET